Understanding the Effect of Government Spending

UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON CONSUMPTION Jordi Galí Javier Vallés CREI and Universitat Pompeu Fabra Economic Bureau of Spanish Prime Minister J. David López-Salido Federal Reserve Board Abstract Recent evidence suggests that consumption rises in response to an increase in government spending. That finding cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. Weextend the standard new Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb consumers. We show how the interaction of the latter with sticky prices and deficit financing can account for the existing evidence on the effects of government spending. (JEL: E32, E62) 1. Introduction What are the effects of changes in government purchases on aggregate economic activity? How are those effects transmitted? Even though such questions are central to macroeconomics and its ability to inform economic policy, there is no widespread agreement on their answer. In particular, though most macroeconomic models predict that a rise in government purchases will have an expansion- ary effect on output, those models often differ regarding the implied effects on consumption. Because the latter variable is the largest component of aggregate Acknowledgments: We wish to thank Alberto Alesina, Javier Andrés, Florin Bilbiie, Günter Coenen, Gabriel Fagan, Eric Leeper, Ilian Mihov, Valery Ramey, Michael Reiter, Jaume Ventura, Lutz Weinke, co-editor Roberto Perotti, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Bank of Spain, Bank of England, CREI-UPF, IGIER-Bocconi, INSEAD, York, Salamanca, NBER Summer Institute 2002, the 1st Workshop on Dynamic Macroeconomics at Hydra, the EEA Meetings in Stockholm, and the 2nd International Research Forum on Monetary Policy for useful comments and suggestions. Galí acknowledges the financial support and hospitality of the Banco de España, and CREA-Barcelona Economics and MCyT (grant SEJ 2005-01124) for research support. Anton Nakov provided excellent research assistance. This paper was written while the last two authors worked at the Research Department of the Banco de España. The opinions and analyses are the responsibility of the authors and, therefore, do not necessarily coincide with those of the Banco de España, the Eurosystem, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or any other person associated with the Federal Reserve System. E-mail addresses: Galí: [email protected]; López-Salido: [email protected]; and Vallés: [email protected] Journal of the European Economic Association March 2007 5(1):227–270 © 2007 by the European Economic Association “zwu001070405” — 2007/1/24 — page 227 — #1 228 Journal of the European Economic Association demand, its response is a key determinant of the size of the government spending multiplier. The standard RBC and the textbook IS-LM models provide a stark example of such differential qualitative predictions. The standard RBC model generally predicts a decline in consumption in response to a rise in government purchases of goods and services (henceforth, government spending, for short). In contrast, the IS-LM model predicts that consumption should rise, hence amplifying the effects of the expansion in government spending on output. Of course, the rea- son for the differential impact across those two models lies in how consumers are assumed to behave in each case. The RBC model features infinitely-lived Ricardian households, whose consumption decisions at any point in time are based on an intertemporal budget constraint. Ceteris paribus, an increase in government spending lowers the present value of after-tax income, thus generating a negative wealth effect that induces a cut in consumption.1 By way of contrast, in the IS-LM model consumers behave in a non-Ricardian fashion, with their consumption being a function of their current disposable income and not of their lifetime resources. Accordingly, the implied effect of an increase in government spending will depend critically on how the latter is financed, with the multiplier increasing with the extent of deficit financing.2 What does the existing empirical evidence have to say regarding the consumption effects of changes in government spending? Can it help discriminate between the two paradigms, on the grounds of the observed response of consumption? A number of recent empirical papers shed some light on those questions. They all apply multivariate time series methods in order to estimate the responses of consumption and a number of other variables to an exogenous increase in government spending. They differ, however, on the assumptions made in order to identify the exogenous component of that variable. In Section 2 we describe in some detail the findings from that literature that are most relevant to our pur- poses, and provide some additional empirical results of our own. In particular, 1. The mechanisms underlying those effects are described in detail in Aiyagari, Christiano, and Eichenbaum (1990), Baxter and King (1993), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and Fatás and Mihov (2001), among others. In a nutshell, an increase in (non-productive) government purchases, financed by current or future lump-sum taxes, has a negative wealth effect which is reflected in lower consumption. It also induces a rise in the quantity of labor supplied at any given wage. The latter effect leads, in equilibrium, to a lower real wage, higher employment and higher output. The increase in employment leads, if sufficiently persistent, to a rise in the expected return to capital, and may trigger a rise in investment. In the latter case the size of the multiplier is greater or less than one, depending on parameter values. 2. See, for example, Blanchard (2003). The total effect on output will also depend on the investment response. Under the assumption of a constant money supply, generally maintained in textbook versions of that model, the rise in consumption is accompanied by an investment decline (resulting from a higher interest rate). If instead the central bank holds the interest rate steady in the face of the increase in government spending, the implied effect on investment is nil. However, any “intermediate” response of the central bank (i.e., one that does not imply full accommodation of the higher money demand induced by the rise in output) will also induce a fall in investment in the IS-LM model. “zwu001070405” — 2007/1/24 — page 228 — #2 Galí et al. Effects of Government Spending on Consumption 229 and like several other authors that preceded us, we find that a positive government spending shock leads to a significant increase in consumption, while investment either falls or does not respond significantly. Thus, our evidence seems to be con- sistent with the predictions of models with non-Ricardian consumers and hard to reconcile with those of the neoclassical paradigm. After reviewing the evidence, we turn to our paper’s main contribution: The development of a simple dynamic general equilibrium model that can potentially account for that evidence. Our framework shares many ingredients with recent dynamic optimizing sticky price models, though we modify the latter by allow- ing for the presence of rule-of-thumb behavior by some households.3 Following Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we assume that rule-of-thumb consumers do not borrow or save; instead, they are assumed to consume their current income fully. In our model, rule-of-thumb consumers coexist with conventional infinite-horizon Ricardian consumers. The introduction of rule-of-thumb consumers in our model is motivated by an extensive empirical literature pointing to substantial deviations from the perma- nent income hypothesis. Much of that literature provides evidence of “excessive” dependence of consumption on current income. That evidence is based on the analysis of aggregate time series,4 as well as natural experiments using micro data (e.g., response to anticipated tax refunds).5 That evidence also seems consis- tent with the observation that a significant fraction of households have near-zero net worth.6 On the basis of that evidence, Mankiw (2000) calls for the systematic incorporation of non-Ricardian households in macroeconomic models, and for an examination of the policy implications of their presence. As further explained below, the existence of non-Ricardian households cannot in itself generate a positive response of consumption to a rise in government spending. To see this, consider the following equilibrium condition mpnt = µt + ct + ϕnt , where mpnt , ct , and nt represent the (logs) of the marginal product of labor, consumption, and hours worked, respectively. The term ct + ϕnt represents the (log) marginal rate of substitution, with parameter ϕ>0 measuring the curvature of the marginal disutility of labor. Variable µt is thus the wedge between the marginal rate of substitution and the marginal product of labor, and can be interpreted as the sum of both the (log) wage and price markups, as discussed in Galí, Gertler, and López-Salido (2007). 3. See, for example, Rotemberg and Woodford (1999), Clarida, Galí, and Gertler (1999), or Woodford (2003) for a description of the standard new Keynesian model. 4. See, for example, Campbell and Mankiw (1989) and Deaton (1992) and references therein. 5. See, for example, Souleles (1999) and Johnson, Parker, and Souleles (2004). 6. See, for example, Wolff (1998). “zwu001070405” — 2007/1/24 — page 229 — #3 230 Journal of the European Economic Association Consider first an economy with a constant wedge, µt = µ for all t. Notice that the particular case of µ = 0 corresponds to the perfectly competitive case often assumed in the RBC literature. According to both theory and evidence, an increase in government purchases raises hours and, under standard assumptions, lowers the marginal product of labor. Thus, it follows that consumption must drop if the previous condition is to be satisfied. Hence, a necessary condition for consumption to rise in response to a fiscal expansion is the existence of a simulta- neous decline in the wedge µt .

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